Trigger rules

Trigger Rules are powerful tools that allow you to offer help on certain pages displaying custom messages. It’s a mechanism that triggers the live chat box on a specific match in the current URL with a custom message.

Trigger Rules are rules or conditions about parts of your URLs that trigger the chat box:

If a certain word or string is present in the URL your visitor is currently visiting, the chat box will be triggered with the custom message that you want to display there. Each Trigger Rule has its own rule, and its own custom message that will be displayed in the triggered chat box.So if you create a Trigger Rule “Pricing”, in which the key word is ‘pricing’, this key word will match

http://www.yourdomain.com/pricing

http://yourdomain.com/products/pricing.php

EXAMPLES

Suppose you have several URLs, for example

yourdomain.com/women-shoes.html

yourdomain.com/women-skirts.html

yourdomain.com/women-dresses.html

yourdomain.com/men-shoes.html, and

yourdomain.com/men-jeans.html.

If you create a Trigger Rule with the key word ‘women’, which is a part of 3 URLs, this Rule will cause the chat box to be triggered on all 3 URLs containing ‘women’, with its custom message that you created especially for visitors browsing pages with products for women.

If however, you make an other Trigger Rule with the keyword ‘men’, the chat box will be triggered only on the 2 URLs containing the word ‘men’, with their custom message especially created for visitors browsing the products for men.

And if you make a Trigger Rule with the keyword ‘jeans’ it will be triggered only on the 1 URL form the above list that contains the word ‘jeans’. In this case your custom message could be something like ‘Hi, can I help you choosing the right jeans?’ or ‘Hello, did you see that the Levi’s jeans are on Sale now?’

The custom message is applied per Trigger Rule, so you can enter custom messages that are related to and specific for the matched URL.

KEEP IN MIND

- Avoid making conflicting Trigger Rules, and that they have an Order of Execution.

- If you want to be sure that a certain Trigger Rule only triggers the chat box with its custom message on one certain page, just put the string of that page in the box URL Contains. For example women-shoes as the string matching only one URL, being yourdomain.com/women-shoes.html, to be sure it won’t work on other URLs with ‘women’ but without ‘shoes’, or on other URLs containing ‘shoes’ but not ‘women’.

NAME

The name of the trigger rule will be seen by the agent when there’s a live chat request originated by this trigger rule.

URL CONTAINS

Enter the matching part of your website’s URL where you want to offer help to your visitors with a customized message. E.g.: pricing will match http://www.yourdomain.com/pricing or http://yourdomain.com/products/pricing.php. E.g. gclid will match any URL when visitors come from an AdWords campaign.

TRIGGER AFTER

The number of seconds that the visitor browses the specific page, before this trigger rule will trigger the live chat box. Minimum: 10 seconds.

DISPLAY MODE AND MESSAGE

Choose if you want the trigger to make the chat box pop up as the Pre Chat Form or in the chat room mode, and for the latter enter the customized message for this trigger rule, to be displayed when the live chat box pops up.

DEV MODE

The possibility to enable Dev Mode is there to allow you to test your Trigger Rules, to see if they work as expected, without having to delete cookies. When Dev Mode is active, the chat box will be triggered every time the condition in the Trigger Rule is met, bypassing the “Block Trigger Policy”. Also, it won’t count the number of conversions. Use this Dev Mode only to test your Trigger Rules and disable it when the Trigger Rule is ready to be applied to the website.

ENABLING

Please note that you need to enable the Trigger Rule to make it functional on your website. Disabled Trigger Rules will be kept in your Control Panel but they will not work on the website as long as they are disabled.

DEPARTMENT

Here you can choose if a specific Department should receive the chat requests that were triggered by this Trigger Rule, or all Departments. The Departments feature is only available for the Corp Plan. More info about the settings can be found in the Departments tutorial.

EXECUTION ORDER

In the list of Trigger Rules, you can drag and drop them to put them in the correct execution order.

They must be ordered from the most specific to the most generic. This way the live chat box will pop up with specific messages instead of generic ones.

Be careful with the order of execution. If you have the “women-dresses” Trigger Rule, but you put a generic Trigger Rule above it in the list, the visitor will get the generic chat invite when he/she lands on the page with women dresses anyway, because the women dresses Trigger Rule is lower in the list than the generic one.

CONVERSIONS:

In your list of Trigger Rules the number of Conversions per Trigger Rule is displayed. So you will be able to see how many times that Trigger Rule has been converted into a live chat session.

You can also view these stats in your Google Analytics.

BLOCK TRIGGER POLICY:

This will allow you to determine that triggers will not be executed during a certain number of minutes after the visitor refused to accept the live chat invitation, or when the visitor already chatted with an agent. This setting can be done in the Account Settings Menu at Block triggers Policy (in minutes>: Do not execute a Trigger Rule for XX minutes after the user already refused to accept the invitation, or the user already chatted with an agent.

You can deploy this as an ‘anti annoying policy’ so you won’t make them feel harassed with a live chat box that pops up over and over again.

ADWORDS

If you have an AdWords campaign, you can set ‘gclid’ as the matching URL-part, to make the Trigger Rule execute, to make the live chat box pop up with the custom message, after xx seconds when a visitor comes to your website from AdWords.

Because when someone clicks an AdWords ad, the URL will have ‘gclid’ in it. This part is added to the URL by Google AdWords, it will make the URL look like this: domain.com?gclid=abcdeffdf (example).

Whatever your actual landing page for the AdWords ad may be, you can make a Trigger Rule that ‘gclid’ must be a matching part of the URL, and display a custom message to visitors arriving on your page from the AdWords ad.

AVAILABILITY

This feature is only available for the premium plans: in the Plus Plan 2 Trigger Rules can be saved, and in the Corp Plan you can save an unlimited number of Trigger Rules.

After reading this post you’ll be able to create your own Trigger Rules and surprise your website visitors with custom messages, which will help you increase conversions!

If you have any questions about Trigger Rules, feel free to start a live chat with us, or to submit a trouble ticket. We will be happy to help you.